Rumi's Field Series: After the pain is there love?
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Sharing one of many letters I wrote to a man I loved. He was sexually abused when he was a minor, and, well, you know my story.
August 11, 2015
My mother may not have been right. In fact, she wasn’t. But through you, I too, am getting a sense of her. What it must have been like to simply survive in her time. Primal instinct takes over when one is in survival mode — you know this — you feel it when you express your feelings of being vulnerable as you travel alone through “some really sketchy places — strips a lot of things away.”
Then, to have a moment like the one you had at the bar when you want to write our initials on the marble wall — had it not been for catching sight of the manager walking in you would have lost the moral compass society imposes on us and defaced the wall — which, btw, I love. I love. I love.
Falling in love is such a primal feeling. It’s been around forever. It is the most primal feeling we can have a humans.
Gosh, I am all over the place here. This is what you do to me. I am all over the place.
So when I say I am a “dork” — I am. I will do whatever I want to do without any concern about what anyone thinks of me. I believe you do this as well. That is my definition of a dork. Someone who walks out of step with the rest of the world.
I walk to my beats. My beats are vastly different, so very different than anyone else I know. Except for you. In many ways my beats seem to be aligned with yours.
So when we have these preconceived notions — like you with “The Rocking Horse Winner” — that’s so tragic. And me: my conditioned story used to be Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” — at some moment in time — the moment I read it — maybe I was 17 or 18 — I knew I was fated to be Lily Bart. I feared I was fated to be Lily Bart.
And, when I found myself in a glorified world with the rich and famous — wearing pearls and furs — when I found myself in that world — I knew Lily Bart was lurking somewhere in my shadow. Something, something was going to get me. I was going to slip through the fabric of a society imposed on myself by myself and die.
We are such romantics — you and I — to tie our souls to the souls of such doomed fictional characters.
Only people with imagination and spunk, I am sure, can do this. And only people who have developed strong survival skills can escape these preconceived notions of poetic tragedy.
In my case, I took control of my fate in many steps. Many steps. One of the most obvious (to me) and the one that tied me to Lily Bart (for the last time) was just before I decided to leave California. I met and became engaged to the man who used to own Cartier. He was 67 and when he proposed he sat me down and told me he had suffered from prostate cancer, and while cured, he could no longer have sex.
He went on to assure me that he would/could provide me with a wonderful life. That we were intellectually well suited. That we made good companions. We would travel the world and I would never need or want for anything.
As far as I was concerned, at that moment in time, sex was overrated and because he physically could not have sex — he was, for my needs, perfect. Of course, he did not know, nor did I tell him that his biggest flaw (in his eyes) was for me the biggest attraction.
He gave me a Rolls Royce and we started looking for a home. And really, a home is an understated term. We were looking at mansions.
One day he calls me and tells me he is at a doctor’s office. He then excitedly explains that there is a new pill that will soon be on the market and that his doctor has given it to him first. He will be home in 15 minutes and we can have sex!
I froze. I could not fathom having him touch me in that way. I quickly gave him back the car and decided I was done in LA and I’d rather be alone in my tiny apartment in the city than be unhappy with a man. That was the end of my Lily Bart obsession.
So am happy to see your words: “all about changing that” — and if you are — you might want to reconsider the photo of you at 2 on the rocking horse and maybe put it somewhere else.
I miss you in a way that I can’t even explain.
If I feel like this now, I thought earlier today, while walking in the rain — I wondered “how will I feel after he has kissed me?” How will I feel after I know what your kisses feel like and you are not here? What will that longing do to me?
I have to go.
You are my sun.
And yes, the sun has risen.
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Copyright Kirby Sommers
